Giving Bitcoin as a Gift, Initial Thoughts
'Tis the season and I'm thinking about how to give bitcoin as a gift, to non-technical people, without requiring them to do anything like create an account or download software in order to accept it. Paper Wallet Bitcoin paper wallets have been around a long time. The concept is simple. Generate a send/receive address pair (private/public key pair) and print them on a piece of paper. Basic operations: To add bitcoin to the wallet, send some bitcoin to the receive address To check your balance, type or scan the public key into any blockchain explorer To gift that bitcoin, just hand over the piece of paper To send the bitcoin on the blockchain, type or scan the private key into the bitcoin wallet software of your choice Pros: simple, no fancy hardware or software required for them to receive the bitcoin Cons: No guarantee that the giver didn't keep a copy of the private key Private key could be easy for someone else to see/copy Private key could be easily lost If you wan